April, 2012

Help Desk is an arts-advice column that demystifies practices for artists, writers, curators, collectors, patrons, and the general public. Submit your questions anonymously here. All submissions become the property of Daily Serving. Help Desk is co-sponsored by KQED.org. I have created a book about mail art, done over a 30-year span, which served as a communication between another artist and myself. Besides containing a lot of[…..]

Even if you don’t think that Cindy Sherman is one of the most important contemporary artists, there is no denying that she is certainly one of the most referenced both in criticism and and in art education. Today for from the DS archives we bring you just one of the many articles Daily Serving has written about Cindy Sherman over the years. I will also[…..]

Looking at Zachary Buchner’s one-man show of mixed media plaster paintings at Andrew Rafacz Gallery entitled, Just Say Yes, I couldn’t help but think of Julian Schnabel’s sculptural plate paintings from the 80’s. In both cases, the dense treatment of the surface straddles the line between sculpture and image while exploring painting as an idiomatic language. Unlike Schnabel, Buchner doesn’t go in for representation or introduce[…..]

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley Unless you really take Lent seriously, and I don’t know many Protestants who do, Easter is a quick event. It’s especially so if you consider all it encompasses: betrayal on Thursday, death on Friday, mourning on Saturday, new life on Sunday. To condense all this into one weekend feels very Christian.[…..]

Cities are filled with innumerable details and a foreign land can be barrage of data. In Barcelona, on a walk, I drift from details of leafy building ornamentation to blank walls of flaking stucco, submerged in texture of all kinds. Man’s signs are everywhere, waiting to be decoded. Though I know nothing of graffiti, I am captivated by the drawing, the view of a flat[…..]

In The Savage Mind (1962), Claude Lévi-Strauss made a case for “the intrinsic value of a small-scale model” of art, legitimising the art of the miniature because it “compensates for the renunciation of sensible dimensions by the acquisition of intelligible dimensions”. The miniature or the microcosmic representation is, as Lévi-Strauss rationalised, a schematic reduction permitting immediate intelligibility, because it essentially constitutes a bona fide experience[…..]

The thing about traveling on an airplane is that we take for granted how phenomenally absurd it is. There we sit, unfazed, hurdling through space at 500 miles per hour, 30,000 feet above the ground in a metal tube, surrounded by complete strangers whom in all likelihood we will never see again. There is also the unspoken airplane etiquette that we all hope the stranger[…..]